UMA Part A: Lecture 1

Welcome to the class!

Greetings. On behalf of Oklahoma State University (OSU), and its College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, I welcome you. This is a course designed for people of all different backgrounds, from those who farm for a living to those who have never been on a farm. The material is accessible to high school or college students but hopefully enlightening even to those with graduate degrees in agriculture. Some parts of the course will be me giving lectures, but other parts will find us on a virtual field trip. To understand modern agriculture we must understand the advanced technologies used on today’s farms in the developed world, and the scientific principles behind them. This includes both the physical sciences and the social sciences.

Meet agricultural economist: Bailey Norwood, PhD (fbaileynorwood.com)

We will take a tour of the soil testing lab and see how cutting-edge physics and chemistry are used to test the nutrient available in soil, so that farmers know how much fertilizer to apply, and what kind of fertilizer. We will take a tour of the dairy farm at OSU, where we will see a baby cow being born, how the calves are raised, and the automatic milking machines. At the swine farm we will observe how swine farmers care for baby pigs from their birth until they are ready to be bred or sent to slaughter. At the beef farm we will see recently-born calves playing in pastures, watch a rancher artificially inseminate a cow, and observe the managing of a feedlot. A quick visit will be paid to the wheat farm, where we will study an experiment measuring the effect of fertilizer on crop growth that has continued for over a century, as well as a breed of wheat created by using chemicals to induce genetic mutations.

Our purpose isn’t just to see how modern farms operate, but to understand the controversies surrounding modern agriculture. At the dairy farm we will discuss antibiotic use in milk cows. At the hog farm we will discuss the animal welfare debate. On the beef farm we will address a host of issues, from synthetic hormone use to carbon footprints. Of course, when discussing agricultural controversies we shall not exclude genetically modified organisms.

The purpose of this course is not to persuade you to adopt any particular opinion on agricultural issues. Instead, we will focus on developing an understanding of why two equally kind and smart people can form radically different notions about food. This requires us to delve into the social sciences of economics and political science. The main goal is not to make you form a certain opinion, but to help you form your own, educated opinion. This isn’t a course about what to think, but how to think about agricultural controversies.

Humans have overcome many challenges in the last century, and many challenges remain. This course will describe the evolution of modern agriculture from the fifteenth century AD until today, where we will witness how markets, property, and profit-seeking have led to marvelous technologies improving the efficiency of agriculture, and lowering the price of food. The course will then remark how, in the mid-twentieth century, we learned that not every technology which reduces the price of food is good for humanity. Now we now know that pesticides may reduce the price of food but can endanger health. Plowing the soil can produce ample amounts of food today but encourages erosion, threatening future generations’s ability to feed itself. Livestock are sometimes cheaper to raise in cramped cages, but some wonder if the animals suffer.

While still receptive to technological improvement, we do not assume that any technology which lowers the price of food will be good for humanity. These technologies are today required to jump more hurdles, such as receiving social approval and regulatory approval. Yet we do not all agree on how many or what kind of hurdles society should erect, and from those disagreements emanate the numerous controversies surrounding modern agriculture.

Our world is confronting considerable challenges in its quest to feed the world safely while respecting animals and the environment. Some of these challenges might require political solutions, so we would be doing our world a disservice if we ignored the political nature of food simply because it makes us feel uncomfortable. But don’t worry, this course is equally friendly to all political flavors :)

Food has never just be a source of nourishment. Our religions and cultures are replete with food symbolism, because what we eat does not just determine our health: it broadcasts our identity. We will meet Medieval Europeans who use food to enforce social inequality, and modern-day hunter-gatherers who use it to enforce equality. The Jewish ban on eating pork and the Buddhist ban on eating meat will be discussed, as well as a Medieval man who defended himself from an accusation of heresy by the Cathloic Church by proclaiming he eats meat. We will ask why the U.S. President pardons a turkey every Thanksgiving, only to then eat the meat from a different turkey. We will hear Stephan Colbert make a joke about the unhealthy American diet, and then talk about the positive side of American food culture.

You have surely heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” Well, to understand what kind of people we are, and what kind of people we wish to be, we must understand modern agriculture. So let’s get started.

We know that our food comes from farms, but I want to start this course thinking about the social institutions that feed the world. To do this, I want to introduce you to the town I live and my favorite grocery store, and then ask the question: who feeds this town?

Understanding Modern Agriculture: Introduction

Greetings. On behalf of Oklahoma State University (OSU), and its College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources, I welcome you. This is a course designed for people of all different backgrounds, from those who farm for a living to those who have never been on a farm. The material is accessible to high school or college students but hopefully enlightening even to those with graduate degrees in agriculture. Some parts of the course will be me giving lectures, but other parts will find us on a virtual field trip. To understand modern agriculture we must understand the advanced technologies used on today’s farms in the developed world, and the scientific principles behind them. This includes both the physical sciences and the social sciences.

Meet agricultural economist: Bailey Norwood, PhD (fbaileynorwood.com)

We will take a tour of the soil testing lab and see how cutting-edge physics and chemistry are used to test the nutrient available in soil, so that farmers know how much fertilizer to apply, and what kind of fertilizer. We will take a tour of the dairy farm at OSU, where we will see a baby cow being born, how the calves are raised, and the automatic milking machines. At the swine farm we will observe how swine farmers care for baby pigs from their birth until they are ready to be bred or sent to slaughter. At the beef farm we will see recently-born calves playing in pastures, watch a rancher artificially inseminate a cow, and observe the managing of a feedlot. A quick visit will be paid to the wheat farm, where we will study an experiment measuring the effect of fertilizer on crop growth that has continued for over a century, as well as a breed of wheat created by using chemicals to induce genetic mutations.

Our purpose isn’t just to see how modern farms operate, but to understand the controversies surrounding modern agriculture. At the dairy farm we will discuss antibiotic use in milk cows. At the hog farm we will discuss the animal welfare debate. On the beef farm we will address a host of issues, from synthetic hormone use to carbon footprints. Of course, when discussing agricultural controversies we shall not exclude genetically modified organisms.

The purpose of this course is not to persuade you to adopt any particular opinion on agricultural issues. Instead, we will focus on developing an understanding of why two equally kind and smart people can form radically different notions about food. This requires us to delve into the social sciences of economics and political science. The main goal is not to make you form a certain opinion, but to help you form your own, educated opinion. This isn’t a course about what to think, but how to think about agricultural controversies.

Humans have overcome many challenges in the last century, and many challenges remain. This course will describe the evolution of modern agriculture from the fifteenth century AD until today, where we will witness how markets, property, and profit-seeking have led to marvelous technologies improving the efficiency of agriculture, and lowering the price of food. The course will then remark how, in the mid-twentieth century, we learned that not every technology which reduces the price of food is good for humanity. Now we now know that pesticides may reduce the price of food but can endanger health. Plowing the soil can produce ample amounts of food today but encourages erosion, threatening future generations’s ability to feed itself. Livestock are sometimes cheaper to raise in cramped cages, but some wonder if the animals suffer.

While still receptive to technological improvement, we do not assume that any technology which lowers the price of food will be good for humanity. These technologies are today required to jump more hurdles, such as receiving social approval and regulatory approval. Yet we do not all agree on how many or what kind of hurdles society should erect, and from those disagreements emanate the numerous controversies surrounding modern agriculture.

Our world is confronting considerable challenges in its quest to feed the world safely while respecting animals and the environment. Some of these challenges might require political solutions, so we would be doing our world a disservice if we ignored the political nature of food simply because it makes us feel uncomfortable. But don’t worry, this course is equally friendly to all political flavors :)

Food has never just be a source of nourishment. Our religions and cultures are replete with food symbolism, because what we eat does not just determine our health: it broadcasts our identity. We will meet Medieval Europeans who use food to enforce social inequality, and modern-day hunter-gatherers who use it to enforce equality. The Jewish ban on eating pork and the Buddhist ban on eating meat will be discussed, as well as a Medieval man who defended himself from an accusation of heresy by the Cathloic Church by proclaiming he eats meat. We will ask why the U.S. President pardons a turkey every Thanksgiving, only to then eat the meat from a different turkey. We will hear Stephan Colbert make a joke about the unhealthy American diet, and then talk about the positive side of American food culture.

You have surely heard the saying, “You are what you eat.” Well, to understand what kind of people we are, and what kind of people we wish to be, we must understand modern agriculture. So let’s get started.

We know that our food comes from farms, but I want to start this course thinking about the social institutions that feed the world. To do this, I want to introduce you to the town I live and my favorite grocery store, and then ask the question: who feeds this town?

Home and Table of Contents

This page has moved to http://fbaileynorwood.blogspot.com/p/table-of-contents.html

Understanding Modern Agriculture: objectives and implementation strategy

UNDERSTANDING MODERN AGRICULTURE: OBJECTIVES AND IMPLEMENTATION STRATEGY

Drafts of the lectures are always posted and updated at this link. The course will be complete by the fall semester of 2014. We should begin advertising it on D2L’s Open Courses.

Objectives:

  • To take the student on a historic tour of agriculture from the sixteenth century to today, so that they understand how market forces, policy, and technological innovation have shaped agriculture. They will gain an appreciation of the bounty of food that mechanization, science, and industry allows, as well as the challenges they pose. A history of food culture is also provided.
  • To take the student on a series of virtual tours to demonstrate how modern agriculture works, including tours of a beef, swine, and dairy farm; crop breeding and fertilization experiments; a grocery store and a farmers market; and a number of scientific laboratories, including a soil testing lab.
  • To take the student on a tour of modern agricultural controversies, instilling in them an appreciation for why equally smart and kind people can form radically different notions about food, and to help students form their own educated views. Such topics include water pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, animal welfare, antibiotic use, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and genetically modified organisms.

Implementation and target audience

Understanding Modern Agriculture is built to be versatile for OSU and accommodating to the public. It is versatile in the sense that it can be offered as a traditional internet-based course, or, with a provider such as Desire2Learn’s Open Courses, administered as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). Also, the content can be accessed through webpages and YouTube videos, and thus can be used as supplementary materials to other courses at OSU (perhaps even high schools).

The course is accommodating to students in that it is accessible to a diverse audience. The material is presented assuming little prior knowledge of, and no actual experience in, agriculture. Yet, it should be enlightening even to those with advanced agricultural degrees. The course takes a panoramic view of agriculture, explaining how conventional farms raise livestock and crops, how markets connect today’s grocery stores with farmers across the world, how advanced chemistry and physics are employed in soil testing labs, and why ground-breaking epigenetic research in biochemistry is destined to revolutionize agriculture.

The public is also accommodated in the sense that they may take (a) part of the course for free and without credit (b) part of the course for college credit or (c) the entire course for college credit.

Assessment

Those taking the course for free are not required to demonstrate their participation or learning. The course is, however, designed to award college credit for those who learn the material. The assessment philosophy is to make high grades easy to earn if the student “attends” the lectures, but to cover enough material that attending all lectures consumes a considerable amount of time. Note: “attending” a lecture entails reading an article, watching a video, or listening to an audio recording).

Assessment will be conducted using two strategies. The first strategy employs standard quizzes which can be conducted on platforms like D2L’s quiz software, which are graded automatically and can be taken at any time. So long as the student covers the material there should be no problem answering all answers correctly. These questions will be ordered so that students can answer them as they attend lectures.

A second assessment strategy allows interaction between the instructor and students, and requires participation only. That is, they are required to contribute, but are not graded on what they contribute. Forums will be used for discussion, and perhaps I will conduct surveys of students’ perceptions and attitudes on certain topics. Other times I will ask students to share something from their life that is related to a lecture. For instance, they may post an anecdote about a food custom from their family, a picture of their local farmers market, or information from an external source. After giving virtual tours of the beef, dairy, and swine farm, I will ask students if they have any questions. They will be answered in videos described as “office hours”, which might involve me simply answering questions, or brief interviews with farm managers or scientists. The idea is to allow the course to go beyond my expertise, if the students wish.

Course Organization

Each lecture consists of both an article and a video (in a few cases audio is used instead of video), both containing the same basic material. There is considerable variety in the style of videos. Some are standard lectures using slides (filmed at ITLE); other lectures display multiple videos, pictures, and notes simultaneously; and others are virtual tours of farms, labs, and food providers. There is even a lecture told through short fiction.

A draft of the contents and lectures can be viewed here. I welcome all comments.

Part A: Lecture 2


Who feeds Stillwater?

Welcome to my town of Stillwater, OK, home of the Oklahoma State University Cowboys. If you include the college students, we have a population of about 45,000 people, and very few of them grow any of their own food. So who, then, feeds Stillwater?

Figure 1—Stillwater, OK welcomes you!

That is an awkward question, I know, one to which we all think we know the answer. No one person or organization is the sole authority for feeding the citizens of Stillwater. The residents earn money through some non-farming occupation, and then go to the store to purchase their food. However, there is more than one store. There are five grocery stores, a number of other smaller, specialty stores selling food, many restaurants, and for a small town a surprising number of food trucks. There is also a farmers market that is open twice a week, and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative that delivers locally produced food to the town.

I think the best answer as to who feeds Stillwater—and who feeds any modern democracy—is markets. There is a market for fresh, local food satisfied by the farmers market and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative. There is a market for convenient foods in great variety met by the grocery stores. There is a market for ready-to-eat foods met by the restaurants and food trucks.

Below is a picture of my favorite grocery store in town: Consumers IGA. Though this store may be my favorite, there are many other stores like it both in Stillwater and across the U.S. In the food aisles of this store you can see the success of modern agriculture. No other people on Earth has had access food as delicious, as diverse, as convenient, and as affordable as the food in this store. If one is willing to purchase healthy food, no other people have found it so easy to eat healthy.

Figure 2—Consumers IGA Grocery Store in Stillwater, OK

This store provides a magnificent service: connecting the citizens of Stillwater with food produced around the world. There are peas grown in New Jersey, frozen immediately after harvest so that when defrosted it is like eating them right off the plant. Because of refrigeration we can eat fresh peas any time of the year! There are bananas grown in Guatemala, eggs from Indiana, pork from hogs that were likely raised in North Carolina, shrimp caught in Thailand, and bread from wheat that might have been harvested just down the road from Stillwater.

I say that markets feed Stillwater, because the manager of this grocery store did not need to call the banana producer in Guatemala to place an order of bananas. Nor did he talk to a pea producer in New Jersey, correspond via email with egg producers Indiana, purchase shrimp directly from a boat in Thailand, nor did he even communicate directly with the business who produced bread from wheat grown in Oklahoma. The manager of this store can bring in food from any part of the world without ever leaving the town of Stillwater. For him, acquiring Thailand shrimp is just as easy as New Jersey peas.

If the grocery store manager had to acquire all of the food sold in the store directly from the farmer, there would be much less variety and most of the products would be priced higher. The only way this store manager can bring you food from around the world is if markets bring it to him, just like the only way a Thailand shrimp farmer can sell the shrimp she catches to you is if she sells it in a market. This is why we say markets feed Stillwater. If we instead remark that farmers feed Stillwater we would be ignoring a long line of markets and business people who played an essential important role in providing you with a diverse assortment of high quality, affordable food. In fact, for every dollar you spend on food only about $0.16 goes to the farmer to compensate them for their contribution. The rest goes to food processors, wholesalers, retailers, and the like, suggesting that what happens to food after it leaves the farm is more important than what happens on the farm.

Figure 3—84% of the value of food is added after the farm

The manager bought the food from a wholesaler, that wholesaler bought those foods from other middlemen, and who knows how many other middlemen were required to bring bananas from Guatemala to Stillwater. For example, a Kansas City distributor helped bring the Thailand Shrimp to the U.S. Markets are not just a place where people buy and sell things. Markets are the collection of the millions of exchanges occurring between the people who produce raw materials, the people who transform those materials into a consumer product, and the people responsible for bringing those goods to a convenient location to sell directly to consumers. Markets are simply a series of trades, where food is property that changes hands from one person to another until it is finally eaten.

The benefit of trade: comparative advantage


Figure 4—Shipping by rail

The benefit of trade is obvious in my favorite grocery store. Stillwater could produce its own bananas, but we would have to do so in expensive greenhouses. That would be a ridiculous thing to do, seeing that we can import bananas from Costa Rica for such a low price. Likewise, Oklahoma is particularly suited to wheat production, and much of what we produce is exported to the world. Certainly, some of that wheat is consumed in Guatemala. When each region produces the foods it is best suited to produce, and then trades some of it for the goods it cannot produce well, everyone has more food. As you know, a team performs best when each member performs the tasks best suited for them, and the same goes for world in food production.

The benefit of trade: specialization

Even if all the regions of the world had the exact same soil, climate, and resources, making each region equally suited for the production of any good, they can still benefit by trading with one another. When a farm—or any business, for that matter—is able to specialize in one or a few goods they are able to hone their skills and purchase expensive machinery that boosts the productivity of labor. A small diversified farmer with 50 acres of wheat and 30 cows could never afford combines and expensive feeding equipment. Instead, some people specialize in wheat production and produce a lot of it with combines, and others manage large feedlots where they feed thousands of head of cattle.

Figure 5—Combine harvesting wheat

Figure 6—Machinery used to feed cattle at a feedlot

The U.S. produces far more wheat than they consume, and it is because of their large output that they can produce wheat at such a low price. We are able to do this because the wheat we do not consume is easily exported to other countries, so without trade, there is less specialization, less technological innovation and development, and less food.

There is considerable specialization not only in what foods are produced, but one’s specific role in the production of that good. For a can of spinach, there are some businesses that specialize in producing the spinach, some in producing the aluminum can, and some in producing the can’s label. For a whole chicken, some specialize in producing the chicken, some in the corn the chicken eats, some in the plastic packaging in which the chicken is sold, and some in the refrigeration used to keep chicken from spoiling as it is transported. In a modern, prosperous country, everywhere you look you see specialization and trade, even in the ancient industry of food.

In fact, trade is what allows citizens of the modern world to accumulate so much wealth. To illustrate, suppose that you are Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, and everything you consume you have to produce yourself. Even if you know how to produce everything from grilled fish to pharmaceuticals, the fact that you have to spend so little of your time devoted to each good means that you will never become adept at producing any one good. There isn’t enough time to polish your skills, research new production technologies, or build machinery and tools that improve your productivity.

Though humans are the most intelligent of animals, we only prosper in groups. Alone on an island we stand less chance of survival than a bird, or even a dumb crab. Each of you will go out into the world and specialize in a particular job, and will use the money you earn to buy goods produced by other people. Imagine how long it would take you to personally produce all the goods you consume in a day. One lifetime is not enough. We are prosperous because we specialize and trade, but this is no recent insight of my invention. It was best said by the French economist Bastiat in the nineteenth century.

Figure 7—Frédéric Bastiat, a 19th Century French Economist and Journalist

From the 1850 book Economic Harmonies

    It is impossible not to be struck with the measureless disproportion between the enjoyments which this man derives from society and what he could obtain by his own unassisted exertions. I venture to say that in a single day he consumes more than he could himself produce in ten centuries.
—Bastiat, Frédéric. 1850. Economic Harmonies. 1: Natural and Artificial Organization. Read a longer version here


Technology and trade

If you ask most people why food is so cheap today they are likely to remark on the technological innovations in agriculture, and they would be correct, but they are likely to neglect to add that those innovations are made possible through markets.

Most technologies tend to be useful only to larger farmers. The automatic milking machines used on today’s dairies greatly improves the productivity of labor, but is unprofitable on farms with just a few cows. Driverless tractors are a blessing for farmers with thousands of acres, but they are too expensive to use on a fifty acre farm. As we have seen, large farms and thus better technologies are only desirable if regions can trade with one another.

Technology does not fall from the sky like manna from heaven. Most of the time they are the deliberate attempt of an entrepreneur to make money. That is why governments award entrepreneurs who create new technologies with patents, giving them a monopoly in the sale of that technology for a number of years. Indeed, the first U.S. patent was awarded to Samuel Hopkins in 1790 for his new way of acquiring potash from the ashes of burnt plants.(P1)

Figure 8—Patent for potassium fertilizer innovation

Skepticism of technology

There is no doubt that trade and technology have reduced the price of food, but some wonder whether the low price of food hides costs that society pays elsewhere. If low food prices come at the expense of poor future health, soil erosion, and pollution, then the total costs of food may be higher today than before. Those who believe the low food prices in my favorite Stillwater store have hidden costs sometimes turn their back on the modern technologies used to grow food and the modern food distribution system that brought Thailand shrimp to Stillwater, OK.

These individuals may then seek organic food. If certified organic, the farm never used synthetic pesticides or chemical fertilizers, two modern inputs used to produce the vast majority of food but are nevertheless viewed skeptically by some. Other individuals do not even want organic food if it is sold in a standard grocery store like Walmart, because they fear the low prices on food from around the world must be masking a hidden cost somewhere else. Such individuals often seek food at farmers markets, where they can meet the farmer and know there no large food corporation who handled the food between the farmer and the consumer (some people fear corporations particularly). Certainly, Stillwater acquires very little of its food from farmers markets, but those who do shop there particularly value its food.

So, who feeds Stillwater? I’ll say it again: markets. This food market includes conventional grocery stores like Walmart and Consumers IGA but farmers markets as well. The manner in which farmers raise foods depends on the extent of each market. The market for conventional groceries is huge, and so most of agriculture uses what this course calls “modern” technologies, but as the farmers market grows it might cause more food to be produced on smaller farms, using more traditional techniques. The question of who feeds Stillwater is then being decided every day by how each of us shop, as well as the social culture and government policies that alter our shopping behavior.

This means that to “understand modern agriculture” we must also develop an understanding of how most farms operate but alternative farming systems as well.

Figures

(1) ((By Fletcherspears (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons)

(2) Used with permission from owner/manager of store

(3) Canning, Patrick. February 2011. A Revised and Expanded Food Dollar Series. Economic Research Service. United States Department of Agriculture. Economic Research Report Number 114.

(4) By Doug Wertman from Rogers, AR, USA (Cajon Intermodal) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(5) By Cyron (flickr.com) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

(6) Personal photo.

(7) Wikimedia Commons

(8) CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/), GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons)

UMA Part A: Lecture 4


Your life, if born a beef calf

Cow-calf stage of beef production (0-8 months of age)

You are probably born at night and with little difficulty, but if your mother has trouble delivering you then your first contact outside her womb may be in the arms of the rancher, as she helps deliver you safely, with little harm to you or your mother. As the sun rises you see the world for the first time, and one of these sights is the rancher’s truck coming your way. Your mother does not run from the truck, as it is delivering food, so you do not run either. As your mother begins munching on the grain the rancher quickly catches you, places an ear tag in your ear, coats your navel with iodine, and then releases you. This tag contains a number, which is basically your name, allowing the farmer to record your mother’s identity and to also track your progress. Before releasing you, some ranchers may place a pellet under the skin of your ear, which slowly release a synthetic growth hormone that will help you grow fast, reducing costs for the rancher and the amount of resources consumed for each lb of meat you produce.(S2) Not all farms use the hormones though; it depends on its price and the expected weight gain the rancher believes it provides. Though this farm waits until later to castrate males, some perform castrate the day the calves are born.

Figure 1—Cow and her calf

For the next month you will never be touched by a human hand. In fact, except for a few times in the next 8 months of your life you will be left alone in a large pasture, living what most would call a natural life (natural except that you have little need to fear predators). When you are handled it is to vaccinate you against several viruses and to pour liquid on your back, which wards off flies and various parasites.

Some ranchers may castrate males on the day they are born, cutting a whole in the scrotum sack and pulling the testicles out with their hands—for one semester as an undergraduate this was my job, and yes, it takes some getting used to! Many farms will wait until you are a month or two old, and will place a tight band (think of a small but strong rubber band) above your scrotum sack and below your belly. Cutting off circulation to your testicles, the band causes the scrotum and its testes to die and fall off your body. A third method is the burdizzo, which crushes the cords above the testicles. The longer the rancher waits the more traumatic and painful the castration may be, and if you are not castrated you provide inferior meat and are more likely to injure ranchers and other cows. Anaesthetic could, but rarely is, used on working farms.

Not all breeds of cattle grow horns. The Angus and Polled Hereford breeds, for example, do not. If you are one of the breeds who naturally grow horns they will probably be removed to prevent you from hurting yourself, other cows, or humans. This can be achieved by rubbing a paste on the buds of your horns. The paste probably contains calcium hydroxide and sodium hydroxide, chemicals that work by burning and thus destroying the cells that produce horns. Or, you may be dehorned using other methods, like burning the horn buds with a hot iron, or using an implement that simply “scoops”the horn and its root out of the head. Without anaesthetic these procedures can be painful, but the pain is temporary and arguably better than having your side pierced by the long horn of one of your peers. Though many farms remove horns without the use of anaesthetics in the U.S., doing so is illegal in some nations and increasingly unpopular.

It will likely be cold the day you are born, perhaps in late February or early March. It may strike you as odd that every other calf is about your age. Indeed, every mother cow conceived at about the same time because they were brought to estrus simultaneously. Ranchers synchronize estrus by inserting a small device in the cow’s vagina, a device referred to as a CIDR, which resembles a tampon. The CIDR will remain in the vagina for seven days. On the sixth day an injection of prostaglandin is administered and on the seventh day the CIDR is removed. The cow will then go into ’heat“ (i.e., estrus) eight to eleven days after the CIDR is inserted (and one to three days after it is removed).(R1)

On any given day there are a number of different ways of detecting which cows are in heat . Most livestock seem to exhibit some degree of homosexuality, and when a cow is in estrus other female cows will often try and mount her as if they are going to breed her, thereby revealing to the rancher the cow is indeed in heat. A similar method is to take a cow not needed for breeding and inject her with testosterone (a male hormone) so that she behaves like a male. This testosterone-pumped female will then try and mount every cow in heat.

I once had a job where I rode a horse and penned a herd of cattle in the corner of a pasture. Then for fifteen minutes I watched this hormone-altered female as she tried to mount others cow in heat, and would then write down the identification number of the cows being mounted (a cow in estrus will also want to mount other cows). The next day someone would artificially inseminate the cows on that list. Other ranchers attach a device to head of the hormone-altered female with something resembling a ball-point pen on the bottom. Then, whenever she mounts another cow, as the bottom of her head rubs against the cow’s back it releases ink. The rancher can then identify cattle in heat according to whether their backs are painted. Not all farms use such advanced technology.(O2) Some just release a bull into a herd of cattle and allow them to breed naturally.

It may seem odd that you are born at a time when there is little grass to eat, but the reason becomes obvious in a few months. Though you will nurse for perhaps eight months you will begin supplementing milk with grass when only a few weeks old. By June and July you are growing fast, constantly nursing and grazing, and your mother needs as much nourishment as possible to produce your milk. June and July also happens to be the time when grass (the cheapest feed) is most available. You were born in late winter so that grass is most abundant when it is most needed.

To help meet all your nutritional needs there is always a mineral block (or bowl of ground minerals) in the pasture, something you feel the urge to lick periodically. This helps ensure you have all your mineral needs met, but it might also contains some antibiotics which helps you stay healthy and grow fast. Water will always be available in the form of a trough fed by groundwater or a “tank” (a small pond).

When noticing that all other calves are roughly your age, what you do not recognize was that there is a smaller herd of cows you never encounter. Calves in this herd were born in the early fall, and thus needed food the most when it was cold and no grass grew. Around the time you were born these calves were being weaned and sent to the market for sale. Because there was no grass, the rancher provided these calves forage in the form of hay, so they had plenty to eat. Feeding hay is more expensive than grazing grass, and thus these fall-born calves are more expensive to raise. The higher expense discourages ranchers from calving in the fall, but because there are fewer weaned calves on the market in March, the rancher receives a higher price. Thus, some producers are willing to incur the higher cost of calving in the fall because those calves will receive a higher price. Markets thus coordinate ranchers’ calving such that there are weaned calves at almost all times of the year, and thus there is a year-round supply of fresh beef.

Figure 2—Cattle eating hay

Back to your life, and the life of other calves your age. Only very rarely are you confined to small spaces. Most of the time you live in a large pasture with other calves and their mothers. You will not be confined to a barn unless you are very sick, and once the grass starts growing it does so in ample quantities. Life feels natural, like this is the way you were supposed to live. Your mother by your side always, peers to play with, and new pastures to explore, you cannot imagine anything else you could possibly want.

By October you are more mature and independent, and though being weaned is stressful and you call and call for your mother, the anxiety doesn’t last long. To help you through this stressful time the rancher may supplement your forage (grass and hay) with a grain supplement, and the second you look sick health care is provided, usually in the form of antibiotics. Some ranchers anticipate health problems at weaning, and in response add low levels of antibiotics to your feed. At birth you weighed around 80 lbs, but now you weigh 500. Two weeks after being weaned, it is now time for the second stage of your life, and the second stage of beef production.

Before going to the second stage of your life, let’s pause and consider what your life would have been like if you had been born a heifer, which is what females are called before they have their first calf. If the rancher decides to keep a heifer for breeding purposes, the only time she will leave the farm is right at the end of her life. Until then, she stays on the farm and is kept in a pasture with other heifers until about fifteen months old, after which she is bred for the first time. The gestation period for cows is nine months, so this will have her calving at about two years of age, in late winter. Some ranchers may simply place a bull in the pasture for natural breeding, but others may use artificially insemination (AI). Heifers have more trouble calving due to their smaller bodies, so ranchers may use bull semen from sires known to produce smaller calves. The rancher will also keep a closer eye on heifers than the older cows.

After a month passes a rancher may use ultrasound to detect if she is pregnant, and if not, will either sell her for slaughter or breed her again. After she gives birth the heifer becomes a cow, and will be placed in a herd, and there she will continue to produce calves for two to five years—or perhaps even up to ten years, depending on her reproductive performance and ability to provide milk. There will come an age when she is less productive than younger heifers, and the farmer will sell her for slaughter. After being sold in an auction she is transported and held in pens for a few more days, after which her muscle, though too tough for use as steaks, will be processed into a processed meat like ground beef or sausage.

Remember, you are not this hypothetical heifer. You are a steer, and it is now time to introduce you to your second stage in life. If you had been born a heifer that the rancher decided not to retain for breeding, your life would have been the same as being born a male.(B6,N3)

Stocker stage of beef production (8-12 months of age)

After being taken to an auction and sold to a new owner, you are placed into a group of strangers of roughly the same size and age. For a few days you are held in small pens, and then transported to your new home. There you are again held temporarily in pens, and perhaps another synthetic growth hormone will be placed under the skin of your ear. The farmer may replace your old ear tag with a new one, and may even brand you using a hot iron or a extremely cold iron (which permanently turns the hair white). Just to be safe you might be administered some antibiotics in your feed, but only a short time passes until you are once again released into a large pasture.(A1,S2) It’s not exactly the home you once knew, but very close to it.

Figure 3—Stocker cattle grazing on young wheat

Now you are a stocker calf, and the first thing you notice is that the grass tastes different. You have tasted wheat for the first time. The farmer grew wheat for two reasons: to feed cattle and to harvest wheat for sale. However, she can only do both if you and your friends are removed from the wheat before the wheat develops its “first hollow stem”. This is when an ungrazed wheat plant begins growing a hollow stem just above the level of the plant roots and has reached a length of one-inch (so the farmer must make sure there are some wheat plants that are not grazed). If wheat prices are low and the price of cattle high, the farmer may decide to let you continue grazing wheat after the first hollow stem, forgoing the sale of wheat so that she can sell you at a higher weight.(H1,T1)

This is your story of the stocker stage of production if you were raised in the south-central U.S. In other places you might be fed hay and grain during the winter, or perhaps grazed on winter wheat planted exclusively for grazing (and thus will not be harvested for wheat seed). Some farmers may use fescue or clover, which provide grazing in fall and/or spring.

Figure 4—First hollow stem of wheat

Finishing stage of beef production (12-18 months of age)

Your days of pasture are over. After being sold in an auction you are loaded on a large trailer and transported to your third home, referred to as a feedlot. Upon arrival, the first thing you notice is the complete lack of grass. The air is dry, much drier than your former two homes. The feedlot industry has deliberately moved to the south-central U.S. where the climate is generally pleasant and dry. With little rain the pens in which you live remain dry, and the arid climate helps promote cattle health. It is dusty at times, and you are constantly pestered by flies, but may be preferable to the damp cold. For perhaps the third time in your life a synthetic growth hormone may be inserted under the skin of your ear.

Figure 5—Feedlot

Though the pen that is your new home is not large, the animals are not nearly as cramped as in hog or broiler facilities. There is roughly 250 square feet of space per animal, ten times the amount provided to a hog. There is no shelter from bad weather, not even a shade for the summer heat, so you envy the pigs and broilers in that regard. Most every step you take is atop the urine and feces of other cattle, but because it is so dry at the feedlot the ground feels more like regular dirt than manure. Though you have greater space than hogs or chickens this is partly because you are outside, not in a barn. The pens are designed with a small hill in the center, so that when it rains the water flows away from the center and towards the back and sides of the pen. In these times only part of the lot is dry, so the greater space requirements were not provided out of kindness to you, but in recognizing that in bad weather some of the pen will be too wet to lie and rest.

The absence of grass concerns you at first, until you are given the most delicious feed imaginable. Only rarely in the past were you given corn, soybean meal, or silage, but now it is available in large portions—and you absolutely love it. If given the choice between this feed and grass, you’ll take the feedlot ration every time.(N3)

The feedlot diet is so different than forage—your normal food—that you must be slowly transitioned to it. If put on a high-grain diet immediately the shock of the new feed will cause bloating and/or acidosis (which can kill all the bacteria in the digestive system) and could very well kill you. When first arriving at the feedlot the feed you are given contains high amounts of forage and little grain, but over time the forage content falls and the grain content rises. It is in the feedlot’s interest to keep you alive, and the science of beef cattle nutrition has been almost perfected. As a result, the mortality rate attributable to a grain diet is only 0.06% (the overall mortality rate is only 1.5%). Only 2% of feedlot cattle experience any trouble due to bloating.(N3)

Unlike chickens and hogs, cows rarely fight amongst each other, so injuries are seldom. If anyone in your pen gets hurt it is mostly likely due to riding, where steers mount one another as if they are going to breed. This is pointless, as you are a steer, and your pen-mates are all steers. There are other pens consisting of heifers who were not reserved for breeding, and so their life is nearly identical to yours. Riding is even a problem with the heifers. However, riding is easy to detect, and cattle identified as frequent riders are removed and kept separate from others.(N3)

Though you cannot taste it, at first, your food at the feedlot will sometimes have low levels of antibiotics, even when you are not sick. These “subtherapeutic” antibiotics administered to you reduces sickness, reduces the mortality rate, and helps you grow faster. They can also prevent liver infections, which arises when cattle are eating large amounts of grain and are growing fast. At some point close to slaughter the antibiotics will be removed from your food, to make sure there are no antibiotic residues in the meat that you provide.(A1)

Months have passed since you arrived at the feedlot. Though you miss pastures you also do not wish to stray too far from the feeding trough, where that scrumptious meal is delivered. At 15-18 months of age, and around 1,300 lbs, you are sold for slaughter, where your meat is made into steaks, briskets, ground beef, roasts, and the like.

Your life, which has been largely pleasant, especially compared with the lives of layers and hogs, will feed eight Americans for one year.(E1,H1,N1,N2,N3,S1,T1)

Figure 6—Three stages of beef production

Figures

(1-3) DASNR Kitchen Sink at Oklahoma State University.

(4) Provided by and used with permission from the Noble Foundation.

(5) By H2O (own picture/copied from en:Image:Feedlot-1.JPG) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

(6) Original figure.

Beef (references)

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